Saturday, December 30, 2017

CNN: Covering Up For Ben Rhodes Is Exhausting

This screencap shows how CNN initially reported the protests in Iran and later was forced to change it.
Throughout the day on Friday, reports from a host of sources were reporting on protests that were taking place in Iran.
At 6:31 AM this morning, someone I follow on Twitter noted, “Here’s how it’s being covered.”
Sohrab Ahmari, Senior Writer at Commentary Magazine, had been following the protests from the moment they broke out.
This week, tens of thousands of Iranians took to the streets to register their anger, not at Donald Trump [emphasis mine] or the House of Saud, but at the mullahs and their security apparatus. It was economic grievances that initially ignited the protests in the northeastern city of Mashhad. But soon the uprising grew and spread to at least 18 cities nationwide. And the slogans shifted from joblessness and corruption to opposition to the Islamic Republic in toto.  These included:
The outcome of the protests is hard to predict. So far, the movement is leaderless and appears to lack serious organization. The protesters face a regime that spends much of its energy and resources on ensuring its own survival and won’t hesitate to crack down viciously, as it did in 1999 and 2009. But whatever comes next, Iranians have already shattered one liberal myth: namely, that Donald Trump has revived the regime’s popularity at home.
Who cares about a bunch of Iranians?
The last widespread and sustained protests in Iran occurred in 2009, after fraudulent elections.  At the time, President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shamefully sat on their hands, saying and doing nothing to support the protesters. They later justified their silence by claiming that protesters wouldn’t want U.S. support, which would enable the Iranian regime to paint the protests as a foreign plot.
Tens of thousands of Iranians defied a ban to take to the streets to protest the declaring of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the winner of the election over the more moderate Mir Hosein Mousavi.

Neda Agha-Soltan was an unlikely viral icon. On June 20, 2009, the 26-year-old stepped out of her car on a Tehran street near where Iranians were massing in protest of what was seen as the farcical re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Islamic Republic was experiencing its worst unrest since the 1979 revolution.
The state made it illegal to join the demonstrations and barred most foreign media, which meant the burden of bearing witness to the tyranny of the mullahs was largely left to the citizens who waded in, cell phones in hand.
It was around 6:30 p.m. when Agha-Soltan was struck in the chest by a single bullet, said to originate from a pro-government sniper, though no one was ever charged. Men struggled to save her as others focused their cameras on the unfolding tragedy. One frame from the footage freezes her final gaze as streaks of deep red formed a web on her face. The image, among the earliest and easily the most significant to ever go viral, commanded the world’s attention. Within hours, footage uploaded anonymously to YouTube had been viewed by the President of the United States—proof that our new digital age could not only connect people; it could pry open even the staunchest of regimes. 
A few weeks ago, Iran’s foreign minister and the Ben Rhodes echo chamber began pushing the line that Trump’s threats to walk away from the nuke deal had united the people behind their regime.
The Iran Nuclear Deal and Obama Administration foreign policies in general dropped a chaos bomb on the Sunni powers, wrecking many of Israel's enemies. Now his nuclear deal appears to have thrown the apple of discord into Iran. These actions may be unintentional.  But deliberate or accidental, they are consequential.
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